Japan protests NY Times report on Abe’s wartime views

The New York Times has wrongly claimed that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denied the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in an editorial criticizing the conservative leader amid perceived right-wing shift of Japan politics, a top government spokesman said.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the government has already lodged a protest with the paper and demanded a correction be published.

The editorial, titled “Mr. Abe’s Dangerous Revisionism,” read that “Abe and other nationalists still claim that the Nanjing massacre by Japanese troops in 1937 never happened.”

The prime minister “has never made such remarks,” Suga said, while reiterating Japan “considers it an undeniable fact that the killings of Chinese non-combatants and plundering by Japanese troops did take place after the Japanese army entered Nanjing in 1937.”